BoldAsBrass

Are the young people in this country ever going to wake up? You're being herded and coralled into feeding the machine. There is only one thing to do ... don't play their game ... refuse to rent their bloody flats. They'll soon stop buying up blocks of flats if no-one will pay them half their salary to rent them. Stay at home - annoy your parents - tell them you can't afford to move out and that, as you're now grown-up - you really want to be able to invite your friends round and do pretty much what you like - without having to ask permission.

When rates rise the economy and the banking system are going down the pan. Which is why, despite inflation at more than twice the target, base rate has not moved. And probably won't for 5 years.

Snap! My mum was from a village not far from Cashel.

Sounds like a good way to help out a country with a failing property market - introduce a property tax! You have to smile really. Last time I renewed my passport I got an Irish one - courtesy of it being my mother's country of birth. At the time it was a mild protest at the way New Labour were turning this country into what was beginning to feel like a police state. Glad I did now.

Be fair - they are nutters. Rational argument and debate eludes them. If you make a reasoned comment on there that does not tow the party line you get called all sorts of things. Surely posting does not generate revenue? Isn't it clicking ads that generates revenue? I never understand why people use a forum owned by a software company that advertises its own products all over the site.

Can that be right? I always have the impression that about 20 nutters post all day every day. How does this generate revenue? When I used to use the site I deliberately never clicked on the ads - I would have if the site were run by an individual (like this one) - to help ourtwith running costs and incetivise the owner to keep it going but, once HPC was bought by a software company, I steadfastly refused to click. Even so, it's very rare I see an advert I want to click. I sometimes click just to, as I say, generate a bit of revenue for the owner but I always feel a bit uncomfortable because I know I'm not going to buy whatever is being advertised so the advertiser is paying for a lead he has no chance of converting. I would have thought 3k would be about right. If 300k is right - I'm clearly in the wrong business. If 300k is right and, given that HPC is owned by a software company, you'd think they'd develop and use their own forum software instead of this awful off the shelf stuff.

Do sites like this and HPC actually make money? I get the impression from other people with forums that revenue in the range of $30 to £60 a month is the norm. Is there big money in this lark?

I agree - but what are the chances of that happening? Pretty low I'd say. As well as cleaning politics - I'd like to clean the world of bankers. They are the real culprits in all this. They've created money out of thin air, lent it by the truckload and, when it all went wrong, held us all to ransom. Now, still, and for the next 25 years, they will be collecting the interest on the money they lent and collecting their mega bonuses while the rest of us slog along hoping for continued employment and coping with ever increasing prices. As you say - an interesting anecdote. In my area I tend to gauge things by the state of the pubs and restaurants. Walk into my local town on a Friday or Saturday night and they're all still heaving. Maybe we're all still living in a fool's paradise and the axe is yet to fall.

I quite liked the UK in the 1960s too. I do of course accept that your generation has been shafted to the benefit of mine. On a macro level there is nothing I can do about it. On a micro level I'm going to sell up in a few years and split half the proceeds of the house sale and give it to my two sons. What else can I do? If, on the other hand, in the meantime house prices go down by 50% it will have the same affect as far as I, and my sons, are concerned. Either way I am not going to benefit much. Something I realised a long time ago is that the only people who benefit - always - are the bankers. From cradle to grave they hitch a ride on your back. Notwithstanding all that, the fact is that we are where we are. £Billions have been created out of thin air and lent into the property market. A considerable percentage of the population have bought into the nonsense over the last 10 years and have large mortgages. What is the way out? A large correction in house prices will take the banking system down and the economy with it. Strikes me that inflation is the way out. At the moment price inflation without wage inflation seems to be the worst of all possible worlds so, for your generation, things seem (unbelievably) to be getting worse. I do think it is time your voices were heard. Most people still have no idea and mutter platitudes like 'it's always been hard to get on the housing ladder'. That is, of couse, nonsense. When I bought my first place in the 1970s I borrowed twice my salary to buy a flat in West London which now would cost 10 times the average salary - more probably. And I bought it on my own - no need for anyone else's earnings to be taken into account and I was only earning average money at the time. As an aside - I do wonder where this country would be now if we hadn't had the borrowing binge. There is no doubt it creates jobs and demand but, of course, it can't go on forever. It probably masked this country's transition away from manufacturing and 'real' jobs - but, what now? If no-one borrows to extend their house, buy a car, pay for a wedding, build a conservatory, new carpets, holiday etc. etc. - where is employment going to come from? Clearly we need a structural change to the economy - can't see where/how/when that is going to happen.

Or, even worse, you could be in the one of roughly 180 (190? more?) out of 196 countries that are worse places to live than the UK. I could quite fancy New Zealand or Canada - possibly France or Italy - after that - I think I prefer it here.

Is a house a community resource then? I figure that until and unless the council starts helping me with my acquisition of a house, they have no right to expect me to give it up when it is too big for me. What's next - only allowed to buy 2 seater cars when the kids have left home? What about fat people who eat too much? Should the council regulate how much they eat so that other people can have a share of the food? I know your generation has been and will be roundly shafted - but please don't come up with some sort of totalitarian utopia to redress the balance. You'll regret it if you do because, once you give 'them' draconian powers, they'll just keep taking more and more of them. Next thing you know - the telescreen will be fitted with every TV licence renewal. The solution to this is not tricky. We need to start building some houses on the 94% of the UK that is not built on.

You, like so many people, misunderstand me. I want house prices to fall - for my children's sake. And I'm sure that in some areas of Birmingham prices have fallen and will fall further. What I find I can't do is read that estate agents have a few more properties on their books and assume we're going to get what we want. We want I am afraid unless people take some action.

You have an amazing knack for interpreting numbers. In February 2010 the average agent had 56 properties on their books. In February 2011 the average agent had 70 properties on their books. And you interpret this as meaning that, during February 2011, each agent took on a new property every day ... and postulate, on the basis of your interpretation, that a bloodbath may be coming. I have to say, it's a very strange interpretation and a stranger postulation. I have seen markets with a 'shortage' of properties where, month in, month out, nothing new comes on the market and, in some cases prices were falling and, in other cases, prices were rising. I have seen markets where there are new properties flooding on to the market - again with rising or falling prices. Determining the direction of house prices is a wee bit more complex than observing the number of properties on the market at any one point in time. In my area, during 2009 there was very little on the market. But properties started selling again and a rash of new properties hit the market. Despite (or maybe because of) the increase in supply, prices moved up recovering their post credit crunch falls.

Not as long as don't mind signing a contract with Rightmove and paying them their montly charges. I'm sure they are capable of spotting anyone trying to sell their home privately. The fact is they derive their revenue from estate agents - you can't blame them for not wanting to upset their customers. There was a time when Tesco entered the market and offered the ability for people to list their homes for sale on Tesco's website and have a board in store with local houses for sale etc. - the idea lasted 5 minutes and Tesco went into some sort of partnership with Haart called isold. The simple, unavoidable fact seems to be that when selling their biggest asset, most people want an agent to handle the sale for them.

But, alas, the simple fact is that without an estate agent you don't get listed on Rightmove. The rest are relatively irrelevant.

Legally, they do. If they don't they are breaking the law and the vendor or buyer could report them to the Office of Fair Trading.

Yes, do remind them of their obligations under the Estate Agents Act 1979. From the OFT web site: 'Informing clients about offers You must give your clients written details of all offers received from potential buyers. This information must be passed on promptly. It can be sent by hand, post or fax. You should keep a written record of all offers that you receive. If your client tells you in writing that it isn't necessary to pass on certain offers, you don't have to write in those circumstances. For example, this could happen if the client doesn't want you to write with offers below a specific price level.'

Well, it's never happened before. As people talk to each other a siege mentality develops. A 'knuckle down, tighten our belts, hope nothing else happens, hope I get a job soon, something will turn up' attitude. That's what happened in the early 90s when, at one point, 40% of the men in the road I lived in were out of work - including me. You can't get stampedes out of an illiquid housing market.

Well I guess so - I must admit I did think about the price of my house going down before I bought it last year. And then I thought 'I hope it does go down and give my kids a change of owning without a millstone around their necks all their lives'

I find your 'houses are an investment - consider them as an investment - always consider what happens if the price goes down so (presumably) never buy a house if there is a risk it might go down in price (i.e. NEVER buy a house) etc. philosophy' to be a 'funny attitude'. You must spend your life worrying about money. "Paying a mortgage in a house that has negative equity is a burden: financially and psychologically" It doesn't have to be - it's only a burden if you're obsessed about money and the price of the house and 'have you lost money (ohhh NOOOOOOO!)' and so on. My nephew bought a bigger house 3 years ago. Almost certainly it is worth less than he paid for it. He has a wife and two kids, another on the way. He doesn't feel burdened financially - he just pays the mortgage. He is not burdened psychologically by his negative equity - he is quite sanguine about it and realises that moving up (he wants a bigger house in a couple of a years time when no. 3 needs his/her own bedroom) will be easier if prices don't go up. Some people just live their lives and enjoy them. As for extrapolating what has happened in Detroit to draw some sort of absolute conclusion about buying property in general - can't see the relevance myself unless - and I guess this is true - you are hovering over the UK waiting for the armageddon you are convinced is going to occur.

In which case we are in a new paradigm - and no-one who needs a mortgage to buy a house should ever take one on.

So what? If someone in Detroit has paid off their house and it is now worth nothing - so what? They still have a house and don't have to pay rent to anyone. If your argument is that if you had waited all this time you could now buy a house in Detroit for nothing - well, who'd have known? You could probably buy a house for next to nothing after an earthquake but it's not something you'd bet on happening in the particular town you want to live in. It's a risk you take in life. If there was major radiological accident at Aldermaston and it contaminated the local area - houses there would be worth nothing - but that's no more relevant than the fact Detroit has died. What you going to do if you want to live in Aldermaston - just wait until the day it happens?

You have missed my point completely. I was trying to make a point that if people stopped looking at houses as an investment - and looked at whether they could afford the mortgage - then, having a 90% mortgage was not a big deal. People have had mortgages that size since home ownership became widespread. So. when you say that 'people like this still think property is a good investment' - you, as I say, miss my point completely. If my son said to me: "I want to buy a house. It is 100k - I earn 30k so it will be a 3 x salary mortgage if I get a 90% mortgage and, historically, I should be able to afford the mortgage repayments as long as interest rates don't go up by some radical amount' - I would advise him to buy it. If, at the end of 25 years it is worth 50k because someone decided to build 10 million new houses in the meantime - so what? He will own his own house and not be beholden to anyone. Unfortunately, at the moment he would need a 10 x 30k salary mortgage and, obviously, this is truly absurd and he - unless things change - will never be able to afford to buy. But, to labour the point - 90% mortgages are not the problem - high salary multiples are.

Clearly I was making a hypothetical point regarding the REASON why someone buys a house. In my hypothetical example I was merely pointing out that even IF a house became worthless over the 25 years of paying a mortgage, all other things being equal, that person would be in a better position than someone who had rented all that time. Given that, in the real world, it costs money to rent a house off someone else, clearly a house will never have no value. I was just trying to challenge the assumption that 90% mortgages are intrinsically a bad thing. On this basis loans for anything that depreciates in value are, by definition, a bad thing. If you are buying a house to live in, if you decide that, one day, you would like to own a house and not rely on someone else renting a house to you - then buying one on a 90% mortgage makes sense - if you can afford it.

As I said, it's not the 90% bit that is bad. It's the salary multiples and the variable nature of the interest rates. People have had 90% mortgages since mass home ownership really got cracking after the war.